Life With Spock, Part 2: When Your Child Is Born an Engineer

Some people are born engineers. Their behavior dictates it from the moment they can walk, and you have to treat them accordingly.

Last month, fellow EETimes editor Susan Rambo shared some common experiences when living with an engineer parent. I would like to follow up with a glimpse into the life of a parent of a natural engineer. Here I outline a few tips for parents who may find themselves in a similar situation.

All parents can identify with being subjected to relentless and unyielding questioning by their child. Often the inquisition begins with simple questions such as "What is rain?" but quickly spirals out of control until you can no longer bear to hear the words "But why?" anymore. Some of you, however, also may identify with the unique and interesting experience of having a natural engineer as a child.

Young Spock as he appeared in the 2009 movie.

I have two sons. Both extremely bright, witty, and dare I say handsome. One was born an engineer, the other an artist. This is EE Times after all, so I'm going to focus on the engineer.

You may be wondering to yourself, "How do I know if my child is an engineer?" I believe you can break it down into these three categories: Connections, Obsession, and Destruction.

Lets start with Connections.

A perfect example of this would be with the popular toy K'Nex. In this hypothetical situation, I hand a few K'nex parts to each of my boys.

The Artist:
He would immediately cram two long pieces in his mouth, exclaim he was a sabre-toothed tiger, and charge out of the room. I would like to point out that he skipped over the obvious choice of the walrus. Within a few hours he would find new and interesting ways to connect the pieces, pointing out what they looked like, as though they were clouds in the sky. He may become frustrated with them at some point due to their limited combinations and boring, homogeneous results.

The Engineer:
He would inspect the parts closely. He would stare at them for quite some time, noting how they fit together. Then he would ask, "Why do the long ones have ridges?" In a few hours he will have built a structure as tall as he can manage. Either he has run out of pieces, or it is no longer able to hold its own weight.

Next, the connections come into play. The two boys may be watching How It's Made or some simliar show -- it could be weeks later. Maybe they're watching an episode on steel girders. The engineer sees that the steel is made in an I-beam shape to make it stronger. He jumps up, runs to me, and exclaims, eyes wide with an even wider smile: "For structural integrity!"

At this moment the parental figure will generally have no idea what the child is talking about. I advise you to stay calm and ask what the topic of this observation is. The deluge of data that will follow will surely squelch any curiousity you had on the topic. You see, the question of the ridges had been swimming around in his mind, unanswered until that moment when he was capable of connecting that design method to the question. That connection was significant. From this point forward, that child understands that design method's uses beyond just iron girders.

I was definitely a born engineer. When I was very little, my father built an addition on to the master bedroom, and I got to play with leftover electrical plugs and sockets. Wirelessly-powered wireless music streaming devices had been around for a few decades. I built one, and that project really got me started.

When one of my designs works well, I consider it a work of art. I am driven by the same creative urges that drives a composer, painter, or author. In fact, in addition to doing design work, I am also writing and photographing. It is all the same, creating something out of raw building blocks.

I am still impressed, Frank. My father was an engineer; he was a builder, but he also loved tearing things apart. All of us in the family -- my mother, my sister and I -- all knew full well that once he tore things apart, he didn't quite put things together back.

I've always thought that my youngest son is a born engineer. He is fascinated by the way things work and I often find him taking things apart to see what's inside. Unfortunately, at age five he hasn't mastered the art of putting them back together. But I'm confident that he will in time.

All three of my kids are showing dendencies toward engieering, but my oldest has the clearest direction as to which dicipline.

When he was in sixth grade as a fund raising reward classes got a mechanical pig that walked, stopped, oinked, then walked again. The pigs were going to race with the winning class getting a party. Classes were allowe to modify the pigs, with most adding batteries, or making the feet slide better. My son disassembled the pig figured out what made it stop and oink. He cut the tab off the gear that made it do that, and re assembled the pig. It won before most of the other pigs were more than a third the way to the finish. (There were complaints that this wasn't fair. Unfortunately the school's response was to change the rules the following years to ban modification.)

Is on a middle school robotics team (FLL) and his mechanical knack helped them get to a world championship and take second in mechanical design. Some of the team members who moved to the high school team ahead of him told him that they wished he could have joined that team early.

Good engineers are not stubborn, instead, we are persistant, not giving up, but solving the problem. There are others, though, who ommediately give up and go in a different direction. Those folks should have selected a different profession.

My Father started me reading at age three, he then brought me three sets of books in 1955 my fifth year of age. The books of Knowledge, The books of places and peoples, The books of Things and Procedures. After reading these books by age nine all the incessant questions were avoided. In fact my contribution to the family began at age 4 when I used to read the user manuals of the new cars, then tell my family how to operate the car's features. Once I noticed a tire making a strange noise while the car was moving. Upon close inspection a large bubble was found on the rigth rear tire. A stop at a nearby Firestone dealer got our car an entire new set of tires.

Four years after receiving the books, creativity began to show its face at age six.

The micro-computer was not a flash in the dark mind of a 17 year old but a flame slowly coaxed to hugh fire. The flames continue.